Archive

Time magazine brings us news of a study published in the journal Pediatrics, and the news is that we parents are not breaking the icky news about sex to our kids early enough. And, even when we think we are, we’re not:

That difference highlights a primary problem in the parent-child dialogue about sex. “A lot of parents think they had a conversation, and the kids don’t remember it at all,” says Dr. Karen Soren, director of adolescent medicine at New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. “Parents sometimes say things more vaguely because they are uncomfortable and they think they’ve addressed something, but the kids don’t hear the topic at all.”

A study in the new issue of the journal Addiction aims to support “an independent association between exposure to cannabis in popular music and early cannabis use among urban American adolescents.” The researchers found that 9th graders who listened to music with pot lyrics smoked more pot.

Stunning! Students in the highest third of pot-music exposure were more than twice as likely to be puffing the chronic as were students in the lowest third.

Other, less-peer-reviewed independent research has concluded that marijuana-leaf belt buckles cause pot-smoking, as does coming into possession of rolling papers and downloading old Cheech and Chong movies.

Many a callow 9th-grader has heard the rhyming tale of Dan McGlock, the only man with the corkscrew… uh, you know.

Now comes word from Yale, of all places, that female ducks have evolved a way to reduce the amount of forced copulation by undesirably aggressive male ducks — and the result is reminiscent of poor Dan McGlock. Dan met his demise after he discovered that the target of his affections “had a left-hand thread.”